Anita Chan, “Images of China’s Social Structure: The Changing Perspectives of Canton...

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Images of China's Social Structure: The Changing Perspectives of Canton StudentsAuthor(s): Anita ChanSource: World Politics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Apr., 1982), pp. 295-323Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2010321 .

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IMAGES OF CHINA'S SOCIAL STRUCTURE: The Changing Perspectives of Canton Students

By ANITA CHAN

D URING the three decades of Chinese Communist government, the Party has not only sought to engineer a new economic sys-

tem, a new class structure, and new norms of political behavior; it also has actively tried to reshape the populace's perceptions of Chinese society. In this paper, I shall explore this effort, at the same time show- ing how government programs have produced results that are at odds with government blueprints. The perceptions of society adopted by various sectors of the population have differed distinctly from those of the Party leaders.

These perceptions will be studied through the evolving subjective consciousness of one particular generation of urban Chinese: young people from the city of Canton who, as of i982, are in their early and mid-thirties. They were interviewed in great detail about their experiences while growing up, and about the images of China's social structure they held during their early youth and adolescence.

PERCEPTIONS OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Stanislaw Ossowski's theoretical formulations about social class provide a useful framework for analyzing the interviewees' perceptions. Ossowski argues that different social classes, in order to further their own class interests, adopt a particular image of their own society's structure. Ossowski posits, too, that each class either tends to locate class confrontation at those points that best serve its class interests, or, alter- natively, chooses strategically to ignore the existence of class confrontation. In his work, Ossowski identifies three basic schemata that different thinkers (and different social groups) have used for interpreting social structures:

1 A set of two hundred interviews in Hong Kong with fourteen respondents in I975-I976 resulted in more than 3,ooo pages of transcripts. In addition, I have had access to Stanley Rosen's and Jonathan Unger's transcripts of interviews with some four dozen additional young people. Along with official documentation from China, these interviews provide the underpinnings for this paper. The respondents came from all class origins, but the majority were of middle-class status. Much of my attention will therefore be directed toward the perceptions and dilemmas of middle-class students from Canton. Except where noted, all translations of interviews and articles are by the author. ? i982 by the Trustees of Princeton University World Politics 0043-887I/82/030295-29$OI.45/I For copying information, see contributor page.



296 WORLD POLITICS

(i) The dichotomic schema. In the dichotomic conception, society is defined as dominated by two classes that exist interdependently- the ruler and the ruled (possessing or being deprived of power), the rich and the poor (controlling or being deprived of wealth), and so forth.2 Marx and Engels, for example, predominantly viewed society as dichotomically polarized between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with intense confrontation marking the boundary between them.3

(2) The gradational schema. The social structure here consists of many strata. Stratification is based either on one criterion, such as wealth (e.g., income), or a synthesis of several criteria such as wealth, educational level, social status, occupation, life style, and so forth. This framework allows adjacent classes to meld into one another; it de- emphasizes the intensity-or even denies the existence-of class struggle in society. This schema is often used by American social scientists when propounding the classlessness of American society.4

(3) The functional schema. The functional conception divides society into classes based on the contributions that each makes to the society. Though sharp distinctions between classes are recognized, the notion that each class fulfills a necessary social role by occupying its particular place in the division of labor de-emphasizes social conflict.5

In the following pages, I shall analyze how different groups of young people in China, over a period of three decades, took on these various images of social structure, each group emphasizing one perception and assiduously ignoring the others. I will not attempt to deal with the definition of class or the theoretically complex and often emotional issue of whether there are classes per se in China or other socialist systems. To avoid semantic confusion, large social collectivities will be referred to as "social groups." The term "class" will be employed only in the way the Chinese authorities and the Chinese people use it.

THE LEADERSHIP'S CONFLICTING MESSAGE

The Chinese ruling elite-even more than the ruling elites of most other societies-has tried to instill in the people, particularly the young-

2 Ossowski, Class Structure in the Social Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, I963), I9-37.

3 Ossowski discusses how Marx actually used all three schemata,: As a revolutionary, he used the dichotomic schema; as a sociologist, the gradational; and as a theorist, the functional. Ibid., 69-88.

4 ibid., 38-57- 5 ibid., 58-68. For a shorter and slightly different version of the three schemata of

social structure, see Ossowski, "Old Notions and New Problems: Interpretations of Social Structure in Modern Society," in Andre Beteille, ed., Social Inequality (London: Penguin Books, i969).



IMAGES OF CHINA'S SOCIAL STRUCTURE 297

er generation, an official image of their social structure, together with a value system which supports that image. Members of the generation born immediately after Liberation (I949) were considered as blank sheets of paper on which anything could be written. The new Chinese government proclaimed its great faith that they would grow up to be "new socialist men," internalizing the officially sanctioned social values and images.6

Although at school, the processes of political socialization that aimed to achieve these ends were intense and all-embracing, the young people had to reconcile two conflicting value systems that were taught, because different sections of the Party elite at times espoused con- tradictory messages. The "Maoists" advocated human will as the prime force for economic development; the "modernizers" believed in the necessity of expertise for China's development. The children were taught that both elements were essential; according to the slogan, one should be both "red and expert." In reality, however, these two elite factions-and the different social groups themselves-at times came to treat red and expert as polar types that were mutually incom- patible. In the Cultural Revolution, this was a principal element of what was officially called "the two-line struggle."

We shall see how this disagreement, originating at the upper levels, promoted antagonisms among the different social groups of young people. To explicate how this came about, my analysis will be divided into five periods-the fifties, the pre-Cultural Revolution sixties, the Cul- tural Revolution, the Maoist seventies, and finally the post-Mao seventies. Each section will contain a brief discussion of the dominant official messages, insofar as these were salient in shaping the young people's conceptions of and attitudes toward the social system.

ESTABLISHMENT OF A NEW OFFICIAL SOCIAL HIERARCHY:

THE FIFTIES

When the interviewees first entered primary school in the mid-fifties, they were not aware that their social positions in Chinese society were more or less fixed. Most of them did not know that during the first few years after Liberation, their parents had had to respond to official inquiries regarding their occupations and sources of income for the three years before I949. Based upon this information, their parents had all been assigned "class status" labels. The children first came into

6 Anita Chan, Children of Mao: A Study of Politically Active Chinese Youths (Lon- don: Macmillan, forthcoming), chap. 2.



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contact with this fact when they were required, in second or third grade, to fill in forms to be entered into their primary-school dossiers. Most of them had to seek help from their parents to find out what their inherited "class status" was. By the time they were teenagers, that status had become the frame of reference by which the students ranked each other.

TABLE I

OFFICIAL "CLASS" CATEGORIZATIONS IN CHINA

(Inheritable in the Male Line)

I. Good-class origin ( jieji chenglen haode) A. Politically "red" inheritance (families headed by pre-Liberation

Party members) B. Working class

i. Pre-Liberation industrial workers and their families 2. Former poor and lower-middle peasant families

II. Middle-class origin (yiban chenglen) A. Non-intelligentsia middle class

i. Families of pre-Liberation peddlers and store clerks, etc. 2. Former middle-peasant families

B. Intelligentsia (pre-Liberation white-collar workers and professionals) III. Bad-class origin (jieii chenglen buhaode)

A. Families of former capitalists B. Families of "rightists" (label denoting those who had been too out-

spoken in the Hundred Flowers campaign of I957)* C. Pre-Liberation rich peasant families D. Families of "bad elements" (label denoting criminal offenders)* E. Pre-Liberation landlord families F. Families of counterrevolutionaries*

#These particular labels do not derive from prior economic standing, but from "historical" errors. In this gradational schema, however, these were treated as tan- tamount to "class" labels. There was a special complexity here, though; for instance, the son of a "rightist" of proletarian origin was of a better bad-class status than the son of a "rightist" of middle-class origin.

Obviously, this official gradational schema bears little resemblance to the gradational schemata of Western social scientists, who talk of strata and quartiles, of occupation, wealth, and lifestyle, of white- collar work as higher in status than manual, of educated as against illiterate, and so forth. Such formulations often reflect the social scientists' own biases, but they are not conceived with the object of promoting social change. The Chinese Communist government, on the other




hand, approached the creation of a gradational schema from precisely that perspective.

China's structure of official "class" categories was put forward with basically three purposes in mind. First, it was established as a political instrument-to facilitate the redistribution of wealth and opportunities to the formerly exploited social groups, and to control formerly exploiting social groups so that they could not stage a comeback. By categorizing families and assigning class status labels, for instance, the Party was able to carry out land reform in a systematic manner. Fur- thermore, in the cities this system could be used to obtain a better redistribution of educational opportunities. The children of the old professional classes were reared in a family environment conducive to studying, and therefore continued to hold an edge in climbing the educational ladder. After a class origin had been recorded for each child, the children of peasants and workers could easily be identified in a Chinese version of the U.S. affirmative action program.

Second, the gradational schema was supposed to facilitate acceptance of a new set of social values. The old social value system was an im- pediment to the kinds of change that the Party wanted to institute.' The new government hoped that, by officially reallocating the status of different social groups, new values-the dignity and virtue of manual labor, for example-would be more easily accepted by the whole society. The children's textbooks pictured the peasants and workers as of a higher social prestige; the pre-Liberation capitalists and landlords, because of their former lifestyles and attitudes, were disparaged as "bad- class."

The superior official "class" status of high-level army and Party of- ficials brings us to the third function of the new social schema. It was to serve as an instrument to sustain the new status quo. The rationale was that high-level army officers and Party cadres, having been in the vanguard of the violent stage of the revolution, deserved special respect under the new social order. In order to justify their claims to high social status, they were described as the genuine bearers of the "proletarian consciousness." The peasants and workers who had benefited most came next in political reliability and consciousness, and therefore deserved a higher political status than the former middle or bad classes. This hierarchical ordering of social groups gave the new rulers access to a broad base of support: the 8o-some percent of the population who had been designated as being of "good-class" status.

7 On this subject, see Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order (St. Albans, England: Paladin, 1972), 79-82.



300 WORLD POLITICS

Reinforcing this third function of the new gradational framework was the state's presumption that political attitudes would be transmit- ted from parents to children-that a father's "political reliability" and "revolutionary nature" would tend to be hereditary. On these grounds, a family's rank in the gradational hierarchy was to be retained from one generation to the next. The state expected that political support for the Party would thus continue among the children of the favored 8o percent of the populace. But perhaps as much to the point was that a hereditary system of class origins ensured that the recently acquired status of the new ruling elite would be passed on to their own children.

When my interviewees entered their class status label into their dossiers, they knew little of its significance, however. The school authorities in the mid-I95os did not strongly impose the gradational schema on the children. On the contrary, they predominantly presented to the children the two other images of social structure: the functional and the dichotomic. In the fifties, the Chinese leaders still basically agreed among themselves that, in order to modernize China, the state needed the skill and cooperation of the pre-Liberation and newly trained professionals. Mental labor, though not glorified, was at least given a political standing equal to manual labor. The socioeconomic status of the educated middle classes was thus preserved despite their political demotion below the peasants and workers.

In school, the predominant message was to "study for the revolution." Students were taught that they could best serve society by aspiring to become specialists. The educational system was geared toward the training of expertise. Using the meritocratic principle, there were examinations at each rung of the educational ladder to sort out who was fit to move up. The children of professionals and of the former bourgeoisie continued to be favored under the new system; the social reality of the fifties contradicted the new official model of social stratification.8

The functional schema was used to explain away this inconsistency. The image sketched for the children was that Old Uncle Peasant grew cereal, Young Uncle Worker manufactured steel, Young Uncle Soldier defended the country, and that the teacher was the engineer of the human soul. The various social groups were depicted as contributing to the building of socialism in their own distinct and separate ways. Each was said to be necessary for economic development. There was no allusion to differences in the value of the contributions of each. China's social groups-described by their occupation (not by their

8 Jonathan Unger, Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, i96-1i980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), chap. i.




relationship to the means of production) and bound together by the necessity for the division of labor-represented a horizontal (not hierarchical) social relationship. Their interaction was one of cooperation, not of social conflict or competition.

The third image of the social structure, a highly dichotomized view of society, was also inculcated into the minds of the children. Indi- viduals and groups were categorized as being either among the "people" or in the camp of the "enemy," according to their support of or resistance to the regime. The "people" included all the social groups that were not "enemies"; they were treated almost as an amorphous mass, with a sharp line drawn between them and the "enemy" camp. The children of good- and middle-class status could take it for granted that they were among the "people." In the storybooks, the villains in the enemy camp were always portrayed as bad-class people. In this pic- ture of class struggle, unrelenting vigilance on the part of the "people" was necessary to prevent the "class enemies" from staging a counterrevolution. By creating a dangerous class-enemy, the Party hoped it would be easier to rally popular support behind government policies.9

As is true in other countries, what the children were taught in school succeeded in coloring the perceptions of most of the interviewees.10 They grew up stereotyping "bad-status" people by their ascriptive class characteristics. Even those few who tried to evaluate people as individuals were influenced in their feelings by the pressure of their peer group.

The children also believed in the other two images of China's social structure. Even the middle-class children from professional households accepted what they were taught about the superiority of the proletariat. They did not disdain manual labor, and remember as "glorious" going out with their classmates to help the peasants with the summer harvests. Still, when they came into contact with real peasants and workers, they had difficulty perceiving them as socially higher than middle-class adults. Moreover, as one interviewee recalls, even though he had written in a school essay that he wanted to be a peasant "and the teacher had brought that out as a good essay, . . . actually [I thought] being an engineer was better than being a peasant; you could contribute more." The children romanticized about the glory of abstract peasants

"For historical parallels, see Ossowski (fn. 2), 32, 37. 10 On the West, see e.g., Fred I. Greenstein, "The Benevolent Leader: Children's

Images of Political Authority," American Political Science Review, Vol. 54 (December i960), 934-43; Greenstein, "The Child's Conception of the Queen and Prime Minister," British journal of Political Science, iv (July 1974), 257-87.



302 WORLD POLITICS

and workers; but with the emphasis on "studying for the revolution" it was extremely difficult for them to believe that the ultimate aim of their efforts at school was to become a manual laborer. If urban children from working-class families did aspire to no more than becoming a worker, it was for pragmatic reasons: their grades were not good enough. The meritocratic principle continued to preserve the higher social status of the middle class and to limit the chances and aspirations of children from semi-literate working-class families.

The children encountered additional class differences in their daily experiences. Former middle-class families had been allowed to retain their private possessions and family residences, and they continued to receive a higher salary from the socialist government. These lingering differences were reflected in the clothing and spending habits of their children. They could afford leather shoes, snacks, toys, and books; they could even own fountain pens. Their family environment had taught them to be more genteel and to maintain a social distance from the "rough" children of the working-class families. The visible differences and social distance helped to shape their own scale of social stratification among different groups of children, and their own sense of where they stood socially among their classmates.'1 By the mid-ig6os, however, these notions had changed.

THE CHANGING CRITERION FOR UPWARD MOBILITY:

THE EARLY SIXTIES

During the fifties, not many worker-peasant children had been candi- dates for a university education. Indeed, so few young people had had the required senior high school training that the expanding university system had too few qualified applicants, and even children of bad- class status were allowed to attend university. But by the early sixties, the rapid expansion of mass education after Liberation had made entry to higher educational institutions highly competitive. Accordingly, as Mao gained an upper hand vis-a-vis the modernizers in i963, the government began to move more strongly toward the redistributive goals implicit in the gradational scale. Greater weight in admissions policies was given to class labels so as to offset the generally inferior academic records of the children of good-class workers and peasants. This policy of favoring the formerly exploited classes was known as the "class line." Students of middle- and bad-class status saw their chances being eroded. On the other hand, the students of good-class status did not

11 Chan (fn. 6), chap. 2.




see a noticeable expansion of their opportunities. By the mid-ig6os, the universities could accommodate only a relatively small fraction of the senior high school graduates: in Canton in i965, only some 20 to 30 percent were accepted.12 The sense of competitiveness among all young people sharpened.

Both "expertise" and "redness" were being counted toward admis- sion to higher education. "Expertise" meant academic excellence. "Red- ness," however, was more complex. In Chinese, the word actually connotes two very different things. One is the possession of a "revolutionary nature" by virtue of either one's own class status or one's father's class status-i.e., one may be "red" by birth. The other meaning involves one's own demonstration of "revolutionary" behavior. The issue was how much weight each of these three criteria should be given in university enrollments: (i) "expertise" as shown in examinations; (2) "redness" by birth; and (3) "redness" as seen in an activist political record and membership in the Communist Youth League. Different students naturally wanted the emphasis placed upon whichever criteria were most advantageous to themselves. Four broadly different groups can be identified: the students were labeled as being of bad-class, middle-class, and good-class, the latter being further subdivided into the children of cadres as one group and those of workers and peasants as another. By the eve of the Cultural Revolution, each of these four groups had developed different strategies for moving up the social ladder and had begun to develop a separate identity and self-image, as well as a separate view of what its own social standing should be.

Those in the "bad classes" (at the bottom of the scale) constituted the most distinct group, as outcastes. As the class line and class education were reinforced, they faced constant pressure from Communist Youth League members to criticize and "draw the line" against their own parents. Socially, they were increasingly avoided by schoolmates who were of a better class status.

As a defense against this open discrimination, they formed a separate subculture, with its own norms of behavior. Since they had little chance of joining the Youth League, most of them exhibited only the modicum of progressive behavior that had become necessary to ward off criticism. They were "backward elements," unassertive, reticent, careful in speech and action, passively compliant and, very often, hard- working in their studies. Their only hope was an academic record so

12Anita Chan, Stanley Rosen, and Jonathan Unger, "Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton)," China Quarter- ly, No. 83 (September i980), 399.



304 WORLD POLITICS

outstanding that the authorities would overlook their bad-class back- ground. They could not escape the ritual of drawing the class line with their parents; but in order to maintain an inner integrity, they had ar- rived at an informal agreement with classmates who similarly were outcastes. A bad-class student who went beyond the unwritten ritual- ized limits and truly exposed his father's private affairs was treated as a contemptible traitor by his bad-class peer group. Unlike most of the others, bad-class students privately were often cynical. They were aware of the inconsistencies between government slogans and the realities they faced. They understood perfectly what the class line meant regarding their own situation. The oft-quoted slogan of i965, "There is the theory of class origins, but do not talk merely about class origins; emphasize [political] performance" gave them little encouragement. For them, only the first words of the slogan applied; the rest was rhetoric. Al- though they despised the system of ascriptive labeling and disliked the notion of inheritability of "class nature" and the dichotomic image of the social structure, they were the group that most readily believed that there was such a thing as a "class seal": feeling they had been pushed beyond the pale, they were much more conscious of their group identity and separate interests than the other student groups.

The middle-class students, especially the children of professionals, were, after the cadres' children, the system's favored group. During the fifties they had been granted access to both channels of upward mobility-through the Party machinery and the educational ladder. Since they did well academically, children from this group tended to dominate the posts of student officers in the primary schools. Due to the influence of their family upbringing, they constituted the most achievement-oriented of all the student groups. They generally accepted the system and were committed to the ideology.

These students prided themselves upon their academic superiority even in ideological terms-as being valuable in building up the country. They believed they were genuinely red and expert: "red in heart, if not red by blood." But with the tightening of the class line, middle- class students began to see their favorable position challenged by the students of good-class origin. As the competitive mood mounted in the mid-ig6os, some of the good-class students derided them as "only expert, not red." They were accused of not having "true" class feelings and of acting in a politically enthusiastic manner only in order to get ahead.

The group identity of the middle-class students was less strong than that of the bad-class students. Only when they were challenged as a




group did they begin to see themselves as such. They did not repudiate the Party's premises, however. Most of them recall that they had been willing to treat their bad-class schoolmates as pariahs, partly under social pressure, but partly because they actually believed that members of the outcaste group might harbor "class hatred." At the same time, however, they were unwilling to accept that the good-class students were more "revolutionary" than they themselves were. They preferred the simple dichotomic model of struggle against "enemies," in which they could claim to be as righteously on the side of the angels as any- one. They agreed with the Party's notion that the workers' and peasants' children felt a deep gratitude to the Party; but they could ration- alize that the revolutionary fervor of these students was of a lesser order than their own. One of them recalled that: From what I could see, those people who were said to have class feelings and deep gratitude to the Party and Chairman Mao actually were just manifesting the selfishness of man. It was the feeling that something or someone has been good to me, so I'm now good to him. Yes, that was how I saw it, that it was a kind of selfishness. On the contrary, though it could be said the Communist Party had not been beneficial to me in any particular way, in my heart I knew I understood it even more, better than those people. Mine was not their kind of narrow-minded emotive infatuation. Mine was at the rational level. I even thought that when the critical moment came, ah, see who could be more loyal to the Party. Mine did not involve repaying what you had done for me.

But the workers' and peasants' children were not the chief competitors of the middle-class students; the cadres' children were. The class line policies of the mid-sixties, intended by Mao and other leaders to favor the disadvantaged workers' and peasants' children, instead were benefiting mostly the cadres' children. Reddest by birth, they had the easiest access to the better high schools and universities. Banking on their "political capital," most of them had easily become even "redder" by joining the Youth League.

The privileged access of the cadres' children to both mobility ladders was regarded with envy by all other groups. But it was the children of the middle-class intelligentsia who considered the new recruitment by class line to be most disconcerting and unfair. These students despised those who rose to the top merely by ascriptive criteria, without having to show talent or having to make a personal effort. Moreover, they saw little of a "revolutionary nature" in the cadres' children. The latter's sheltered, soft lifestyle seemed to contradict the official image of proletarian simplicity and revolutionary sacrifice: many of them had their own bicycles, and a few even came to school in chauffeured cars.



306 WORLD POLITICS

Feeling that the cadres' children did not warrant any great respect, and recognizing how far most of the workers' and peasants' children lagged behind in academic qualifications, many of the middle-class professionals' children believed that they were the most qualified to become "revolutionary successors"-that is, to hold the positions of re- sponsibility and trust in the next generation. This ambition was not explicitly articulated before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, but privately some of them were anxious for China to reject the official gradational schema which since about i963 had progressively been en- croaching upon their chances for elevation.

The more ambitious of the workers' and peasants' children knew they could not hope to compete with the brightest of the middle-class professionals' children in the academic arena. But they could expect to achieve an equivalent social status at school by claims to a superior "natural redness." Naturally, they welcomed "redness" superseding "expertise" in recruitment policies for higher education and the Com- munist Youth League. Yet, when they were matched up against the cadres' children, they always came off one notch lower: their parents were merely recipients of the revolution, not its originators. By the gradational scale that they themselves supported, they were less "revolutionary" in nature than the children of the cadres. Thus, these workers' and peasants' children harbored resentment both against the middle-class professionals' children for their academic superiority and against the cadres' children for their successful presumption of political superiority. But they were less ambitious than the middle-class professionals' children in challenging the cadres' children. The only students over whom they could safely claim superiority were their bad-class schoolmates. We shall later observe how they played upon these pre- sumptions of superiority in the early months of the Cultural Revolu- tion.

The children of the cadres-especially the high-level ones-staunch- ly and unquestioningly held to the government's gradational scale. They deviated from the official line only in their eagerness to rigidify the gradational class boundaries. They thought they were superior to others in all respects but one-they did not do as well in their studies as their middle-class professional and bad-class schoolmates. For this, there were at least two reasons: first, due to the class line policies, they had been able to enter schools that normally would have rejected them on academic grounds, and they thus almost always found themselves in the bottom half of their class; and second, since their opportunities of getting ahead were assured, they had less incentive to study. But they




resented being outperformed academically by sons and daughters of class enemies and the former petite bourgeoisie. Venting their frustration, they were among the first to call middle-class students "white experts," discounting academic excellence as a qualification for higher education. Of what good to the revolution, after all, were unreliable "white experts"? At the same time, they patronized worker-peasant classmates whose "natural redness" was by definition of a lower order than their own. Some of them even felt less need and inclination to exhibit political enthusiasm. They knew they would still be sought after by Youth League branches eager to accommodate the class line, and that they were bound to receive high grades in politics courses. As one interviewee cynically remarked, "it would be too embarrassing otherwise."

But most of the other students, in order to justify their claims to legitimacy, had to vie, each in their own way, to prove their "revolutionary proletarian nature." The middle-class students in particular had to make up for their innate deficiency in "natural redness" by becoming especially "red" through political performance. Among this group, we can find the greatest inner urge to become "proletarianized" by con- forming to Party teachings. One politically very active interviewee graphically described the class hatred she tried to force upon herself:

I tried to cultivate in myself the feelings of the poor and lower-middle peasants. The conflict between the [former] poor and exploited peasants and the [former] landlords' interests really was a deep-rooted conflict, a matter of life and death. Those rich and powerful landlords are now powerless and the poor peasants have taken their place. They stand opposed to each other, and we have to stand on the side of the [former] poor and those who suffered. So we are enemies of the former landlords. The class enemies are bound to hate us. I shunned these people. I took them as horrible, fierce. . . . I dared not talk to them in case I got mud- dled up. I must hate them, otherwise I might make a slip, lose my proletarian feelings.

Again and again, interviewees related the frustration of trying without real success to adopt the feelings of another class or another generation, in an attempt to imitate a feeling that was a product of a past social reality.

For some of these students, the effort to force themselves into the expected righteous mold involved a threat to their own integrity; after all, mixed in with the sincerity of the effort was usually the ulterior motive of getting ahead by "proving" themselves. A middle-class student made the following observation of his middle-class schoolmates who felt the need to prove their "proletarianism" by sobbing aloud



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when old pre-Liberation workers and poor peasants were invited into the schools to "recall bitterness." The idea was for young people who had not lived through the years of suffering to have a chance to em- pathize with the previously exploited:

When I heard these old peasants talk I was very moved because I had never heard of that before. It was then that I realized: wow, the peasants had such hardships before. And I realized how lucky we were. But when some of the girls burst out crying, I found it comical. The teachers praised them for having class feeling! Those girls were like that: if one did it, the rest would follow. It was like a fad, as if the more and louder you cried, the more class feeling you had.

Later we were numbed [by the repetitiveness]. We knew we couldn't joke, grin, or look around when the session was going on. We had to put down our heads, pretending, as if we were thinking. When those girls wailed we found it obnoxious, because we weren't at all really sad and had to lower our heads, and there they were crying away!

Such forced behavior only fed the suspicions and disdain of good- class students whose "natural redness" obviated any need to prove where they stood.

TOWARD THE ESTABLISHMENT OF AN ESTATE SOCIAL SYSTEM

Several features characterize an estate system: (i) the closed nature of a gradation of social groupings designed by law: (2) the hereditary nature of social status; (3) extreme restrictions on mobility across social-group boundaries (though these are not as impermeable as caste boundaries); and (4) the priesthood as one channel of upward mobility open to all estates.'3

The groundwork for an estate system had already been laid in the fifties. The official designation of class status labels and the inheritability of these labels (in the male line) were in keeping with the first two characteristics of the estate structure. Beginning in the sixties, moreover, the meritocratic principle began to be displaced by the ascriptive characteristic of "natural redness."

The top Party echelon was internally divided over this latter trend. The modernizers, represented by Liu Shaoqi, were less willing, for the sake of expediting China's economic development, to press for a thorough redistribution of status and opportunities that would favor the good classes. Though they, too, were insistent upon drawing a sharp cleavage between the "people" and the "enemies," pushing the

13 Ossowski (fn. 2), 63-68; Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class and Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, I959), 140-46; G. S. Ghurye: Caste and Class in India, 2d ed. (Bombay: Popular Press, I957), 269-72.




bad-class students out of the competition, their policy would have preserved the chances of the students from the former professional middle classes. Mao Zedong, on the other hand, advocated placing greater importance upon redness (in both senses of the term) as the criteria for individual mobility. He wanted a stronger class line. Were this to be adhered to in access to higher education, as was urged in Mao's name in the mid-ig6os, China would gravitate into an estate-like social system. In time, social stratification in Chinese society would be molded into the shape of the official stratification schema. Upward mobility across the strata would be closed off save for one channel.

In an estate system, the priesthood provides the best opportunity for the lower classes to move up the social ladder. In China, the elite organizations such as the Communist Youth League and the Communist Party served the function of a political priesthood. In both cases, the institutions were devoted to propagating a creed that gave support and legitimacy to the ruling elite. They assured for those in power a systematic way to recruit staunch supporters of the system from all levels of society. The criterion for recruitment was ability and acceptance of orthodoxy and the orders of superiors. In China, the policy of giving consideration to "performance" was aimed at opening the elite organizations to deserving people that were not of the good classes-even to those of bad-class origin.

The assumption that a "red" political performance could outweigh class origins lay with the Chinese conception of "proletarian nature." As Benjamin Schwartz has pointed out, by the time Marxism was re- interpreted with a Maoist slant, the meaning of "proletarian" had changed. "With Marx, the concept of the proletariat embraces two essential components. It refers to a specific socioeconomic class conceived of as social bearer of certain transcendental, messianic tasks, and it refers to the syndrome and virtues and qualities which characterize this class."'4 By the time of Lenin, the phrase had altered in meaning: the Communist Party embodied all the transcendental qualities that Marx attributed to the proletariat. With Mao, the proletarian consciousness and virtues became "entirely divorced from their presumed class moorings." The concept had picked up a populist strain; people from all classes could come to possess "proletarian consciousness"15 by practicing the "proletarian virtues": frugality, poverty, self-abnega- tion, self-cultivation, patriotism, and obedience to the Party. These

14 Schwartz, Communism and China: Ideology in Flux (Cambridge: Harvard Uni- versity Press, i968), I4.

15 Ibid., i6.



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personal attributes actually transcended class, and bore little relationship to the nature of a "proletarian class."

It was based on this Maoist interpretation of proletarian consciousness that people of non-good class origin could still cling to hopes of advancement. Even in a climate of rapid social closure, it gave them an outlet through which to compete with those possessing innate redness. In the years immediately prior to the Cultural Revolution, the two different interpretations of "redness" came into increasingly sharp conflict. During the Cultural Revolution, the middle-class students and the cadres' children would be openly challenging each others' interpretations.

THE FIGHT OVER SOCIAL IMAGES:

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Social development does not always evolve as mapped out in the blueprints of human engineers. In the years leading up to i966, different types of group consciousness and intergroup relationships had emerged independently of the authorities' design. During the two years of the Cultural Revolution, these already tense relationships flared up in open confrontation. Throughout the process, a new image of the social structure developed, which was different from that of the authorities and from Mao's; in the end, it was articulated as heterodox political theory. In order to understand the dynamics behind the emergence of this new independent conception of China's social structure, we shall have to break down the chronology of the Cultural Revolution into three periods.

STAGE ONE: THE AUTHORITIES DICHOTOMIC IMAGE PREDOMINATES

(From the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in May i966 to the withdrawal of the Cultural Revolution work-teams from the schools in early August i966.)

When Mao gave the students the green light in late spring of i966 to attack "bourgeois academic authorities," he opened a Pandora's box. Having internalized the dichotomic image, the students converted their conscious, subconscious, personal, group, genuine, fabricated, or imag- ined grievances and frustrations of previous months into a frenetic search for Mao's hidden enemies among the teachers. They denounced and abused various teachers for their "black histories" and alleged "black utterances." In June I966, Cultural Revolution work-teams under Liu Shaoqi's direction were sent into the schools to stop the chaos.




The work-teams proceeded to narrow the targets of attack to only those teachers who were from the "five [bad-class] category elements." In some schools, the work-teams set up "cowsheds" where these "ghosts and demons" were imprisoned, systematically maltreated, and even beaten.

To keep the Cultural Revolution safely within the tracks of a "class struggle" crusade, the work-teams also embarked on a course of action that had never before been officially advocated in China's classrooms: they openly evaluated the students' political reliability almost solely in terms of their class status. The exercise was intended to give the good- class students the power to lead their fellows during the great campaign.16 The criterion of "performance" was almost completely ignored. The work-teams were implementing policies that the good-class students had long wanted to see established.

However, after about a month, in late July, Mao ordered the work- teams to withdraw from the schools, accusing them of seeking to stifle the Cultural Revolution by diverting the "spearhead downward." But Mao was in no way opposed on general principles to this campaign of Party-sponsored "class struggle." The Maoists and the Party modernizers alike had no qualms about maintaining "class struggle" against the five-category elements as deadly class enemies. Both sides were ready to emphasize or de-emphasize the intensity of this "class struggle" according to the political expediencies of the moment.

STAGE TWO: THE BLOOD-LINE THEORY-THE FOUNDATION OF A NEW

CASTE SYSTEM

(From the withdrawal of the work-teams from the schools through the Red Terror of September/October i966.)

Neither of the two power elites, not even the Maoists, wanted a completely closed social system. But the situation in the schools quickly moved into and beyond the estate system. The work-teams had left the good-class students in control of the schools; Mao endorsed that position; and the cadres' children, emboldened by this turn of events, were soon openly asserting their total claim to power, prestige, and opportunity. They formed Red Guard groups to replace the now-discredited Youth League, which, according to them, was infested with impure

16The work-teams' actions were similar to what had been done not so long ago in the Chinese countryside in the Four Cleanups campaign. In addition to "cleansing" rural corruption, the work-teams had reinvestigated and categorized the peasants' class backgrounds. The Poor and Lower-middle Peasants Association had been revived to give the good-class peasants more self-identity, power, and status.



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class elements. The Red Guard groups were to consist exclusively of good-class students, headed by cadres' children.

The cadres' children adopted a so-called "blood-line theory," which was succinctly contained in these rhythmic lines:

If the father's a hero, the son's a great fellow. If the father's reactionary, the son's a rotten egg. If the father's nondescript, the son's a fence-straddler.17

Previously, no matter how the assumption of an inherited "revolutionary nature" was interpreted, the argument rested on the tenet of parental social influence. The new blood-line theory transformed and rigidified the notion of "revolutionary nature" by ruling out the possibility of attaining revolutionary virtue by political activism and correct attitude. Only "red" blood in one's veins was now to be recognized. Essentially, the cadres' children were redrawing the main line of cleavage in society by placing the sharpest social boundary between the good classes and the rest of the social groups. They thereby expected to reduce the number of people in society entitled to share in social privileges and, most importantly, to disqualify their chief competitors, the achievement-oriented professionals' children. The cadres' children could narrow even further the number of people entitled to claim privileges by relegating the workers' and peasants' children to the bottom of the good-class scale. In essence, they were attempting to build a caste-like structure based on hereditary principles.

They aggressively asserted their claims by turning dramatically against the bad-class students. Some of them proposed that bad-class students be separated physically from the better classes, as in a system of racial segregation.18 Students at one high school in Beijing went so far as to advocate policies not dissimilar to the apartheid policies in South Africa-e.g., to deny to people of bad-class status and their children many of the public services enjoyed by good-class people, and to drive many of them out of the capital into the countryside.19

With the powers of the school authorities crippled and the work- teams gone, the high-level cadres' children frenziedly launched what

17 A new term, "five red type," was coined and counterposed against the "five [bad- class] category elements," which was further extended to "seven black elements." An interviewee reported that in one city yet another term emerged: the "five yellow elements," which included the groups of middle-class status.

18The blood-line theory, indeed, was later attacked by a group of non-good class students as a "new racist theory." High School Revolutionary News (February 2, I967, p. 3), trans. in Gordon White, The Politics of Class and Class Origin: The Case of the Cultural Revolution (Canberra: Contemporary China Centre Papers, No. 9, I976), 7-93.

19 Ibid., 45-46.




they themselves called the Red Terror. Good-class children went about humiliating and physically assaulting the bad-class "ghosts and demons" among their classmates and in the neighborhoods near their schools. The bad-class students were of course terrified, and once the storm of the Red Terror subsided they stayed home embittered. The further away they kept from the vortex of action, the safer they felt.

The reaction of the middle-class status students was different. They had been the most ambitious and achievement-oriented of all young people. They resented the second-class social position they were thrust into by their erstwhile competitors at school. They were cowed, but only momentarily.

Their chance to take matters into their own hands came in October i966, when Mao and his top followers in the leadership publicly re- drew the premises of the Cultural Revolution. Mao's spokesmen denounced the blood-line theory, pointed to the threat posed by "the handful of power-holders in the Party taking the capitalist road," and invited all students to participate in toppling them from their throne.20 The middle-class students responded enthusiastically.

STAGE THREE: THE EMERGENCE OF NEW DICHOTOMIC MODELS

(From the emergence of the Rebel Red Guards at the end of i966 through mid-i968, when Mao put an end to the Cultural Revolution.)

The middle-class students had always considered themselves as part of the "masses," but only in vague terms, and mainly in contradistinc- tion to the "class enemies." However, as they now defined the term, the "masses" were all those ordinary people who had been bestowed by Mao with the power to challenge authorities who were "taking the capitalist road." Just as the blood-line theory had given the cadres' children a claim to absolute innate superiority, so the middle-class students upgraded the superiority of the masses. Armed with this con- viction, they set up "Rebel" Red Guard groups to challenge the Party's powers-that-be and the authority of the already existing good-class Red Guards. Thus, two camps of Red Guards emerged: the Rebels and the Loyalists.

What Mao had unleashed could not be so easily reined in again. Fighting between the two factions lasted for almost two years before it was forcibly brought to an end. As has been demonstrated elsewhere, it was "class warfare"-with the middle-class students almost solidly on one side, the cadres' children on the other, and the worker-peasant chil-

20 See, for example, Lin Biao's National Day speech of October i, i966, and an editorial in Red Flag, October 3, I966.



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TABLE 2

FACTIONAL AFFILIATION OF CANTON HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

No. of Rebel Loyalist Non-par- "Class" origin students Red Guards Red Guards ticipants

Revolutionary cadre 285 I9% 73% 8% Working class 537 34% 40%/O 26% Non-intelligentsia

middle class 302 40% Io% 50?/? Intelligentsia

middle class 664 6i% 7% 32% Bad class 399 36% 4% 60%

Source: Questionnaire responses covering 50 classrooms; z'ide Chan, Rosen, and Unger (fn. I2), 440.

dren divided between the two groups.2' The Loyalist Red Guards, as beneficiaries of the status quo, were fighting for the existing political structure, in many cases defending their own fathers. The Rebel Red Guards, aligned with other social groups that had grievances against the system, were intent upon promoting changes.

The social structure that the cadres' children had aspired to erect had been clear to themselves and others. That was not the case with the middle-class student rebels. They had not formulated a clear conception of what they wanted; nor did they even have a perceptive under- standing of the existing structure. But, as an interviewee who had been deputy commander of Canton's high school Rebel Red Guards asserted,

It's true that some Rebel Red Guards didn't have a very clear or ideal scenario of the future society.... But at least they identified with the fate of the whole revolutionary movement. It wasn't "unprincipled sectarianism" [as Mao was later to claim].2 It was actually something not much different from identifying with one's own class.

21 The workers' and peasants' children had once more been placed in an anomalous position in the first few months of the Cultural Revolution. They wanted good-class status to be the foremost criterion for advancement and esteem, but they had am-ibi- valent feelings about the efforts of the cadres' children to base social and political standing entirely upon the gradational scale. On the basis of "class," they had been relegated to the bottom of the Red Guard organization at many of the schools. When the second camp of Red Guards emerged, many of these worker-peasant students defected to the Rebel Red Guards but retained their own good-class combat units. See Clhan, Rosen, and Unger (fn. I2), 435.

22Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui [Long Live the Thought of Mao Zedong] (Party document, i969), 68i.




In retrospect, he had touched on an important point: without con- sciously realizing it, the Rebels were actually fighting for their group interest. But not until the important Rebel Red Guard article "Whither China ?" circulated throughout the country at the end of i967 did some of them place their "enemies" and their own social situation in a co- herent framework: a new image of the social structure. The article asserted that there had emerged in China a "bureaucratic stratum," a new "privileged stratum," a stratum of "red capitalists."23 The cleavage of the antagonistic contradiction in society was shifted from one between the "people" and the "class enemies" to one between the "masses" and this new "privileged stratum." But, for Mao and the Maoist elite, this interpretation of Chinese society was too dangerous to be allowed to take root. In very short order, the article was condemned as "ultra- leftist" and its authors were arrested.

It has been argued by some China specialists that, by the mid-ig6os, Mao had formulated a new image of China's sociopolitical structure: that he no longer saw the antagonistic contradiction in Chinese society as lying between the "people" and the former exploitative classes, but rather between the "people" and a "new bourgeoisie"-a privileged political-bureaucratic stratum equivalent to Djilas's "New Class."24 But that seems not to have been the case: Mao retained the dichotomic premises he had formulated in "Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" in I957. After i962, he actually sharpened the antagonistic cleavage by advocating a stricter class line. Throughout the Cultural Revolution he did not relinquish this view; the term "new bourgeoisie" was not officially used in i966-i968. The pejorative term, "a handful of power-holders in the Party taking the capitalist road" carried little of the meaning of "New Class," which connotes a sizable privileged group with the power to perpetuate itself in a socialist society. Mao's term, on the other hand, was coined to discredit political opponents who held a different vision of how to steer the country on the road to socialism. "Capitalist roaders" effectively conjured up the image of a retrograde non-socialist enemy group; the carefully con- trived idea of "a handful" connoted the isolated, arbitrary, transient,

23 A translation appears in Klaus Mehnert, Peking and the New Left: At Home and Abroad (Berkeley, Calif.: Center of Chinese Studies, China Research Monograph No. 4, I969).

24 See, for instance, Richard Kraus, "Class Conflict and the Vocabulary of Social Analysis in China," China Quarterly, No. 69 (March I977), 67. Djilas defines the New Class as "made up of those who have special privileges and economic preference because of the administrative monopoly they hold." Milovan Djilas, The New Class (New York: Praeger, 1957), 39.



316 WORLD POLITICS

and noninstitutionalized nature of these traitors to the revolution. The fact that the "capitalist roaders" were so few in number, and above all, inside the Party, ruled out the possibility that they constituted a class or stratum.25 Indeed, in restricting the number of "capitalist roaders," Mao lent credence to his own widely quoted catch- phrase that "most of the cadres are good or relatively good."

Certainly one of Mao's many purposes in launching the Cultural Revolution was to raise people's consciousness against the bureaucratic work-style of authorities at all levels of the bureaucracy. But the Cul- tural Revolution in this sense was no more than another of those cadre rectification campaigns that have periodically shaken post-Liberation China. The difference was one of magnitude. This time, the whole younger generation became involved in giving the bureaucracy a gi- gantic shake-up-and in defeating Mao's political opponents. These new "enemy" bureaucrats were those among the Party elite whose policies were less redistributive, more favorable to the former middle classes, and more reliant on material incentives than Mao's policies had been.

With the defeat of such leaders, the Cultural Revolution was ended by the launching, in late summer of i968, of a fierce campaign: "the Cleansing of the Class Ranks movement." The authorities once again stressed the antagonistic contradiction between the "people" and the bad-class "class enemies." In the schools, the bad-class teachers became targets of "struggle sessions" once again; the Cultural Revolution had come full circle. Many Rebel Red Guard leaders were imprisoned, and the rank and file sent to settle in the countryside. The contradictions among the different social groups of young people were thus forcibly submerged.

VICTORY OF AN ESTATE SOCIAL SYSTEM

With the defeat of the Rebel Red Guards and the Party modernizers, Mao and his followers implemented radical changes to transform Chinese social values and China's social structure. To cite just one example, academic qualifications no longer counted in university recruit- ments. Whatever the intent, the result of the Maoists' new endeavors was an estate-like system. In practice, good-class status heavily out-

25 In a discussion with top Party leaders in i964 on how to rectify the wide- spread corruption of cadres in the rural Party, Mao had declared: "The Communist Party is a prestigious one. Don't bring up any idea of a stratum .... This will frighten and offend too many people. . . . It's enough just to call them [isolated] elements or cliques." Mao Zedong Sixiang Wansui (fn. 22), 582-83.




weighed political performance once upward mobility became officially restricted to the criterion of "redness." Hierarchic differentiation by class label became more distinct than in the mid-sixties; the social system became more closed than ever before.

But the workers' and peasants' children were not necessarily the beneficiaries of these new policies. In the sixties, the class line had given only the brighter of the cadres' children easier access to the universities; in the seventies, with the elimination of entrance examinations, it became an open secret that, "through the back door," cadres at all levels were using their political influence and social contacts to get their children out of the countryside and into the universities under the euphemistic title of "worker-peasant-soldier students."" Ironically, the cadres' children were now literally being favored in the name of the workers and peasants.

During these same years, the middle-class youths were perturbed because the intelligentsia (including some of their parents) were officially disparaged and their status and security jeopardized. In the sixties, the "red" apparatchiki had already been gaining the upper hand over the "experts"; by the seventies, they were exercising an "all-round dictatorship over the bourgeoisie." The middle-class youths believed that a return to an emphasis on expertise and an end to the disdain of intellectuals were essential to solving the country's mounting economic difficulties. More than ever, the problems seemed to lie with the "red" political elite.

At the same time, the dichotomic image of "class enemies" no longer seemed axiomatic to the middle-class students. They had never accepted the inheritability of class attitudes when applied to themselves; but throughout the Cultural Revolution most of them had been perfectly willing to harbor suspicions regarding people of bad-class status. How- ever, now that most of the Rebel Red Guards had been shipped out to the countryside, many of them realized that the rural "four-category elements"27 had been so "tamed" in the past two decades that there was no possibility of their participating in counterrevolution. Some of the young people began to argue that the ruling elite was using the concept of "class" to divert attention from its own privileged position. As one interviewee said, "By the very end we jumped out of the frame

26 The most famous published expose of this situation was the extraordinary con- fession of a high-level cadre's son, Zhong Zhimin, published in People's Daily, January 29, I974, p. I.

27 In the countryside, because there are no "rightist" intellectuals, there are only four-category elements, not five.



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of mind as to whether there should be a class line or not. We ques- tioned the whole system."

Increasing numbers of these former Rebel Red Guards perceived China broadly in the terms laid out by the "Whither China?" mani- festo of the Cultural Revolution-as a predominantly dichotomic schema in which the cleavage between the "masses" and the "new aristocracy" was a power relationship: those without power as opposed to those with power. They considered the differences among the "masses" to be of secondary importance. The foremost necessity was to check the political elite's abuse of power: a "new privileged stratum" of Party people was translating power into illegitimate perquisites and an unduly prosperous lifestyle and was perpetuating its privileged position by using "back door" influence to advance its children into the next generation of power wielders.

The young people's conception of a "new privileged stratum" super- ficially resembled that of the "new bourgeois elements"28 described by Mao's proteges Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao (two of the so- called Gang of Four) in two widely circulated essays of i975.29 Yao in particular argued that "new bourgeois elements" emerged ultimately from an inegalitarian system of income distribution. If the possibilities for acquiring wealth and special perquisites were not restricted, "a small number of people" inevitably would appropriate increasing amounts of material goods, turning "public property into private property." As a result, a small number of new bourgeois elements and upstarts who have totally betrayed the proletariat and the laboring people will emerge from among Party members, workers, well-to-do peasants and personnel in state organs.30

In other words, in Yao Wenyuan's conception, these "new bourgeois elements" were not a result of unchecked power, as was asserted by the former Rebel Red Guards. Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao did not argue, moreover, that a "new privileged stratum" had arisen. In a way similar to Mao's deliberate rhetorical limit to the number of

28 Mao had referred to the term in an offhand manner in i963. The term resurfaced in Lin Biao's report to the Party's Ninth National Congress in i969. (Peking Review, No. i [April 30, i969], I7). Again it was only mentioned in passing, contained in a quote from Lenin: "The new bourgeoisie [is] arising from among our Soviet government employees." It next reappeared in an editorial in People's Daily on February 9, I975, and again on February 2I, I975.

29 Yao Wenyuan, "On the Social Basis of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique," Peking Review, No. io (March 7, I975), 5-Io; and Zhang Chunqiao, "On Exercising All- round Dictatorship over the Bourgeoisie," Peking Review, No. I4 (April 4, I975), 5-IL.

30 Yao Wenyuan (fn. 29), 6.




"capitalist roaders," Yao and Zhang carefully and frequently tacked the qualifiers "elements" and "a small number" onto the phrase "new bourgeois," in order to ensure that the image did not have the con- notation of a self-perpetuating class or stratum. Their list of "new bourgeois elements" included all those workers, peasants, and white-collar staff whose take-home pay or private rural incomes were comfortably above average. By Yao and Zhang's standards, if any single group was to blame for too wide a spread in incomes, it was their political opponents who advocated policies of economic liberalization.

The former Rebels, on the other hand, were less concerned with existing wage differences than with the unequal distribution of power and privilege. They felt that the worst abusers of power were those leaders who pushed political controls and political "struggle" campaigns the hardest-in short, precisely the faction now known pejora- tively as the Gang of Four. In discussions among themselves, these young people argued that such arbitrary political abuses needed to be curbed by institutionalizing the rule of law.3'

They also maintained that under Mao and the Gang, the country's school system had been reduced to a shambles; educational standards, they felt, desperately needed to be restored. The economy was flagging, and they argued that the Gang's egalitarian income policies, imposed through political dogmatism, were draining workers and peasants of all initiative. By the mid-seventies, a great many of the middle-class former Rebel Red Guards had turned against the Party "Maoists" and were leaning toward the alternative leadership faction, the Party's modernizing elite headed by Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. This faction could be expected to overturn at least those policies that were most blatantly offensive to the young people.

DOMINATION OF THE FUNCTIONAL SCHEMA IN THE POST-MAo ERA

When the modernizers won out over the Gang of Four after Mao's death, they implemented a series of policies designed to ameliorate the feeling that there was a cleavage between ruler and ruled. A renais- sance of "socialist democracy and the legal system" was promised with much fanfare. There was an outpouring of articles in the official press lamenting that cadres had alienated themselves from the masses, and that some of them were "riding on the heads of the masses." Editorials incessantly urged that better cadre work-styles be restored and en-

31 These latter points were also the theme of the well-known Li Yizhe wallposter of I974. See Chinese Law and Government, X, No. 3 (Fall I977).



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forced.32 To a limited extent, "experts" were once more allowed to share power with "reds." Cultural, intellectual, and economic policies were liberalized and material incentives were re-introduced. Middle- class support was re-won by re-adopting the meritocratic principle.

Such policy changes inevitably had to be justified through a new conceptual image of China's social structure. It had been many years since the authorities had attempted any sort of re-evaluation of the class situation. They now declared that in the two decades since col- lectivization, the social structure of China had changed. "The large- scale turbulent class struggles of the masses characteristic of the times of revolution have in the main come to an end."33 Landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists who had labored well and behaved themselves could have their "class enemy" designations removed.

But it was more a numerical reduction than a fundamental change in perception. The dichotomic image, though de-emphasized, remained in place. The 1978 Constitution reiterated that "class enemies" continued to exist; antagonistic class struggle had subsided, but class struggle had not been entirely extinguished. The state would continue to suppress all treasonable and counterrevolutionary activities, and would punish all traitors, counterrevolutionaries, new bourgeois elements, and the like.34 The major contradiction in society was declared to be between the "socialist laborers" and "remnants of the capitalist class"-that is, between the workers, peasants, and intellectuals on the one side and a motley mixture of old and new "class enemies" on the other.35

Because "expertise" is now considered necessary for the Four Mod- ernizations, the new concept of "socialist laborer" was introduced as a means of lifting the intellectuals out of their second-class status in the official gradational order. The vast majority of the Chinese population have been declared "laborers" because they all work, regardless of whether they work with their hands or their minds. The intelligentsia, along with the workers and peasants, belongs to the amorphous "laboring masses." Furthermore, the intellectuals' standing in society is now to be determined not by their origins but their attitudes: whether they

32 "Combatting Prerogatives," Beijing Review, No. 25 (June 22, I979), 6-8; "Some Questions Concerning Socialist Democracy," Beijing Review, No. 24 (June I5, I979), 9-I3.

33 "Mobilizing All Positive Factors," Beijing Review, No. 7 (February i6, I979), 5. See also "On Policy Towards the National Bourgeoisie," ibid., and "Victory for the Policy of Remolding the Exploiters," ibid., 8-io.

34 China Quarterly, No. 74 (June I978), 460. 35 Guangming Ribao, November 7, I979, p. 3.




pledge their loyalty to the "bourgeoisie" or the "proletariat." In the absence of an economic basis for this bourgeoisie, the decisive question has become whether they are "selfish" or willing to "serve the people." The newspapers have solemnly declared that the intelligentsia as a whole is of the latter persuasion-a progressive force in the "camp of the proletariat."

By i980, the official news media were thus blurring the distinctions between the various middle and good class categories and were con- veying an image of non-hierarchical differences. As a result, China now has an overwhelmingly functional schema of social structure-social groups harmoniously existing side by side, contributing equally valuable services to the common good: This sector of the population serves that sector of the people. That sector of the population serves another sector of the population. There is division of labor, but in the whole society everyone serves each other without any distinction between high or menial status.36

Though this revived functional schema comes closer to the view of the "masses" held by many of the former Rebel Red Guards, a fundamental distinction remains between this group and the leadership's perception of the negative pole of the dichotomic image. The dissidents of the "democracy movement" have been arguing in wallposters and in the mushrooming "people-run publications" that the major "contradiction" still lies between the "masses" and the "new privileged elite"- between those with power and those without.

The Party authorities, including Deng Xiaoping, have not been willing to tolerate the propagation of such views.37 In early i979 and again in the spring of i98i, the government launched repressive measures. "Democracy movement" organizations and publications were sup- pressed, and their leaders and editors were arrested.38 But the dissident perspective has not been silenced. Wallposters and underground mag-

36 Guangming Ribao, January 7, i980, p. 2. 37 See Deng Xiaoping's speech of December 25, I980, "Carrying Through the Princi-

ples of Adjustment, Improving the Working of the Party, and Guaranteeing Stability and Solidarity," translated in Inside China Mainland (July i98i), 7.

38 During the crackdown of May i98i, the journal of the Party Central Committee, Red Flag, took cognizance of the dissidents' dichotomic schema and denounced it as politically subversive:

They even say that . .. the emergence of a so-called "bureaucratic class" within the Chinese Communist Party ... is a necessary product of the socialist economic and political system; that the contradiction between it and the broad masses of the people has formed the major contradiction in present-day Chinese society; and that only by toppling this "bureaucratic class" could China's problems be solved. This is an anti-Party and anti-socialist political program, whose purpose is to struggle with our Party for the power of leadership, in order to replace it.



322 WORLD POLITICS

azines propounding such views have re-emerged each time like "bam- boo shoots after a spring rain."

CONCLUSION

The past three decades of Chinese history illustrate Ossowski's prop- osition that different social groups adopt varying schemata of the social structure to further their own group interests and to attain specific goals. In the fifties, when the Chinese elite was intent on modernizing the country, the functional image of social structure fitted the government's desire to tap the greatly needed skills of the intellectuals and the "national bourgeoisie." Concurrently, a dichotomic schema was used to generate a feeling of solidarity among the ordinary people. In the sixties and the early seventies, under the domination of Mao's egalitarian vision, a gradational schema was utilized in order to re- distribute opportunities to the "proletariat." Simultaneously, the dichotomic schema was intensified as a means of reviving support for the ruling authorities. In the post-Mao era, the modernizing Party elite has reverted to the use of the functional schema. It has done so in a bid to involve the intelligentsia once again in helping to pull the sagging economy back into shape.

Different sectors of the populace, however, have not necessarily held the images that were advocated by the authorities. The political engineers could not always successfully direct social development. Intensive political socialization programs had only limited and temporary effects. Among the different social groups, different images of the social structure evolved as responses to their own social conditions and in accord- ance with their own group interests. This was evident in the social developments inside Chinese classrooms

in the pre-Cultural Revolution sixties. The students of bad-class status privately persisted in believing only in a functional schema. In this framework, they were equal to everyone else, and their skills were as useful to society as those of any other social group. But their political position was too weak to allow them to air their views even mildly.

The cadres' children held to the dichotomic schema and emphasized "class struggle." But they adhered also, and most vigorously, to the government's gradational schema, which was already in their favor; they exaggerated it in order to promote their claims to privileges. Since their elitist pretensions were threatened by any other criteria that might be used, they attempted to erect a caste sysem in the Cultural Revolu- tion, in which they claimed Brahmanic superiority.




The middle-class students had been untroubled by the use of the official gradational and dichotomic schemas in the fifties. They accepted what they were taught because they were not directly threatened by it. But the increasing weight given to the gradational schema by the government, and the growing numerical pressures and competitiveness in the school system during the early half of the sixties, jeopardized their positions and prospects. They therefore supported both the functional and the dichotomic schemata: both placed them square- ly among the "masses."

But during the Cultural Revolution, they began to shift their views. Boxed into a corner and threatened in the early months, and then as suddenly "liberated" to form autonomous Red Guard groups, some of them eventually stepped entirely outside the government's three ways of perceiving the sociopolitical structure. They adopted a new perspective that was inimical to the interests of the ruling elite. This new dichotomic view of Chinese society depicted a marked polarization between the "masses" on one side and a politically "privileged stratum" on the other. As the "red" elite expanded its authority and succumbed to abuses of power in the seventies, this new countervision of China's social structure gained adherents. If the continued intermittent outpour- ings of wallposters provide any sound indicators, the new vision has withstood the efforts of the post-Mao leadership to recapture credibility through official images of a functionalist social structure. The official- dom has returned to the premises of the I950s, but society has changed; the eighties are not the fifties.



Anita Chan, “Images of China’s Social Structure: The Changing Perspectives of Canton...

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